Prolonged covid, also known as postcovid syndrome (PCC) or long covid, can seriously impair memory and concentration, according to the results of a new online study titled “COVID and Cognition” (COVCOG). . by a team of British scientists.
The research, the conclusions of which were published March 17 in two volumes in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, is based on an 18month followup of the status of 181 patients with PCC recruited between October 2020 and March 2021. Most of them were infected at least six months before the start of the study and only a few were hospitalized. They also included 185 healthy subjects for comparison.
Seven out of 10 of the 181 study participants admitted to having concentration and memory problems months after infection. In particular, 68% suffered from forgetfulness and 60% could not find the right words when speaking. These symptoms resulted in a decreased ability to remember words and images during cognitive tests. The results were even worse in patients with more severe initial symptoms of the disease.
Half of the patients observed found it difficult to persuade healthcare professionals to take their symptoms seriously. Meanwhile, 75% of participants with prolonged coronavirus were unable to work for long periods.
“This is important evidence that when people say they have cognitive difficulties postCovid, it’s not necessarily the result of anxiety or depression. The impact is quantifiable: something worrying is happening, said Muzaffer Kaser, one of the study authors, quoted in a statement from the University of Cambridge.
For her part, Lucy Cheke, another COVCOG researcher, stressed that the long Covid “has received very little attention at the political or medical level. “When politicians talk about ‘living with Covid’, meaning about an unmitigated infection, they ignore that. The impact on working people could be enormous,” he warned.
It should be noted that participant recruitment was conducted when the alpha and original variant were predominant among patients, so the study results do not include data on prolonged covid associated with the delta or omicron variants.
In the meantime, scientists plan to continue following those observed to document how persistent their symptoms will be. In addition, a new cohort is already being formed to study the impact of the PCC in the case of Ómicron and Delta.